This morning I pulled up a local website to see the 4th of July activies. Imagine my surprise when on the home page I see the smiling face of a Facebook friend of mine. Creepy. Privacy is a contextual thing. I never gave Facebook permission to follow me around the Internet. Yet they do.

I've now installed Ghostery on my Firefox browser. And I've killed Facebook Connect and 25 other website trackers. And I've stopped posting on Facebook because I don't want to join their cyber stalking parade.

I have been blogging since 1999 when my friend Doc Searls convinced me it was the next thing. I think that's like 100 years ago in Internet time. My biggest issue is staying on top of the technology wave. For years I have relied on RSS feeds (thanks Mr. Winer).

As usual healthcare IT lagged the market in adopting new technologies, but I found out that there are some great tweets out there now. So here I am @b_fryer

I guess the turning point came when I upgraded my phone to a not-so-smart phone. But it does 3g data, so the wap browser is quite responsive. And I can compose T9 messages with my thumb faster than using a keyboard (and I don't spill my beverage).

A friend of mine has a coffee shop for many years. Business had been good and she was making a good income from it. But having other interests a few years ago she hired Frank to run the shop.

A year into running the shop Frank noticed his coffee prices kept climbing. But since the suppliers has consolidated he only had two to choose from and since the pricier supplier had a good image (but not as good coffee) he picked the expensive blends. But since more money was coming in than going out, Frank didn't worry too much about it.

Frank decided to get more customers, so he cut his prices by 20%. But to no avail. The same customers kept coming, but now he was just making money. A new rail station opened up the road with a lot of new businesses popping up but Frank did not want to take a loan to set up a stand there. Then the customers dropped off at the store. Now Frank was losing money.

So Frank decided to cut the hours the store was open and fire employees. Meanwhile coffee prices continued to climb, and sales started to drop and the store was losing a lot of money. Frank's solution? Cut the store hours again and fire more employees.

Is Frank doing the right thing to get back to profitability? What would you do?

A community builds their own fiber Internet services and it runs 500 times faster than Comcast. I'm thinking we should build our own here too. No wonder the big boys are getting states to make community ISP's illegal. They just cannot compete.